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Much Ado About Farming

A few weeks ago, I found out about an event taking place in Yorkshire that I wanted to attend. After begging the day off, and securing a place to attend, I considered my options for accommodation. Running through my list of friends in the area, I realised quickly that it was the university’s Easter holidays, and so the usual array of floors, sofas and armchairs would sadly be unavailable. This opened up the opportunity to stay on the estate belonging to the aforementioned Sir Pheasant and his peasant farmer. The bedroom I was allocated was bigger than my university flat, and indeed contained more beds than my university flat; my unfortunate but terrifically honest flatmate pulled straws for rooms before I even moved in, and having picked the straw for the small room, kitted out with a futon instead of a bed, was perfectly and admirably honest and began unpacking. She did come to be quite fond of the straw mattress – or so she led me to I believe. All of this aside, the fact remains that the room I occupied during my stay on Sir Pheasant’s farm was absolutely enormous. Another lesson about the country: houses are bigger. The rooms in general in the house were vastly bigger than anything I’d seen in Twickenham or Richmond growing up.

I was curious about the farm, and on the mini tour to view the pheasants and Mad March Hares, I asked a lot of questions. The farm had both livestock (cows and sheep, for meat though not for milk – no Eau de Dairy Farm here) and arable crops, and having been told this, I opened my mouth to ask a question about the cows – only to be corrected before I’d even finished my sentence. Another countryside lesson: while colloquially the term ‘cows’ is used in general to refer to cattle, in Farm World calling a beast a ‘cow’ implies that the beast is female, and has had calves. ‘Heifer’ is the term for a female cow before she has had any calves. A bull is an “intact male bovine animal” while ‘bullock’ refers to a less fortunate male, who has been castrated. The cows (colloquial use) on this farm were all bulls, being farmed for beef. I have to say, I never thought I would know this much about cows (again, colloquial use), and I’m still not sure it will ever be useful, but for now it will become yet another part of my country disguise, so that people think I know what I’m talking about.

Continuing towards the hares’ boxing ring, we stopped on a dirt track between two fields. Sir Pheasant’s farmer, gesturing with one hand to all the land visible in front of us, told me,

– This is all corn.

Corn. Okay, I thought, I know what corn is. I’ve eaten corn. He turned to his left,

– This is wheat…

He swung round to the right,

– …and this is barley.

I stared into the space in front of me.

– I thought you said they were both corn.

He smiled, trying not to laugh, explained what he meant, and I think I understood him correctly (but if not please comment below and further my agricultural education!)

Apparently, ‘corn’ is a term used to refer to any sort of cereal crop, including, wheat, barley, and what I was thinking of as corn is called maize. It starts its life as a type of corn, specifically as maize, then is cut down, stripped and bagged up by the Birds’ Eye polar bear and sold as either corn on the cob or sweetcorn, or failing that is puffed up and sugar coated, and sold as Butterkist popcorn. Unnecessarily confusing if you ask me, and greedy of the farmers who already have an umbrella term for that type of crop – cereal. Why they need a second is beyond me, but as much as I rant here, I’ll keep my lips firmly zipped when out in public among more agricultural folk; until I’ve learned a little – okay, a lot – more, they remain the experts.

Once I’d returned from the far distance lands of the North Yorkshire countryside, two friends asked me about my trip, about the farm I’d stayed on, and I recounted the storied detailed above, about how I’d seen the pheasants and the hares in the fields, about how quiet and peaceful it was, and some more boring facts about the land. Apparently I’d misunderstood something, somewhere along the line, as when I said the farm was 120,000 acres, they goggled at me.

My mother will tell anyone who will listen that I have a good eye for space, and that I should have been an architect. I have always enjoyed things of a 3D nature; woodwork when I was little, and building Lego and Duplo houses when I was littler. As a teenager I had a penchant for all things interior design and used to mock up floor plans of our house. All of this, combined with an A* in Design Technology, an A at A Level in Product Design, and the school Technology prize, I should have decent spatial awareness. And like to think I do, but my grasp of space starts at mm2 and cm2, travels up through sq ins, to pretty much reach its limit at m2. I think a house my aunt used to live in had an acre of woodland out the back, but I was small and it was big and I never full explored the limits of the Acre.

The fact was that before my visit to the farm, at the ripe old age of 23, I couldn’t have marked out how big an acre is to save my life, and even now I’m still not utterly certain whether a hectare is bigger or smaller than an acre. If I’d known then even roughly the size of an acre, I could probably have worked out that 120,000 acres was a little larger than the farm I’d seen. In fact, a 120,000acre farm would be double the size of the city of York, and approximately one seventeenth of all North Yorkshire. So having announced with faux confidence that I’d stayed on a 120,000acre farm, it’s no wonder my friends goggled; they must have thought I’d been staying with the Grand Old Duke of York, or someone of equal importance. After a quick telephone call, it transpired that the farm I described was in fact just as fictional as the Grand Old Duke. In reality, Sir Pheasant’s farm is 300-400acres. This fact and the absurdity of my initial description brought gales of laughter to my friends when I confessed, but I should be grateful – it brought humour, laughter, and yet another smidgen of agricultural enlightenment. And aside from that tiny, negligible misunderstanding, I promise you that everything else about the farm is true: there are strutting pheasants, boxing hares, plenty of corn (wheat and barley among other types), a lot of bulls, just a few sheep and at this time of year, a smattering of lambs to keep them company.